ISV Kaizen

If your host uses Spam Assassin to protect your mail box from SPAM then read this post!

We use Spam Assassin on our host to filter out SPAM. Recently, it was discovered that the Spam Assassin had a bug. It added extra 3.4 SPAM scores to ALL e-mails dated 2010 or later.

I’m afraid we lost some incoming e-mails that were filtered out due-to false SPAM suspicious.

Currently we’re running beta testing of Dr.Explain 4.0. All feedback is extremely important for us! Missing e-mails is unacceptable.

If you sent us a e-mail in 2010 but haven’t received a response yet, please resend it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

… and …

If you’re using Spam Assassin then either update or add 4 points to your filter thresholds.

Scott, an ISV-entrepreneur, on BoS forum has recently complained that since their company had reached a new level of technical documentation the number of service requests grew up.

That’s an interesting effect!

Scott wrote:

Two reasons for this, based on feedback from customers seeking support:

1. Documentation is now so comprehensive that it is intimidating. People see a 1000 page manual and say “no thanks - I’ll just call customer support instead.”

2. Documentation has so much cool stuff described, that it makes people’s imagination stimulated and they start thinking of other, even more exotic stuff they want to do but can not figure out and start a service request for it.

Thus, the common solution to service requests - better documentation - actually causes more service requests, not fewer.

Is this really true and good documentation will harm to your business?

I think that only a big number of pages doesn’t mean that the manual is good. In documentation, users look for problem solutions. The more important thing than the number of pages is the structure of the manual and simplicity of search mechanisms (indexes, built-in troubleshooters, context help, etc. ).

If you have ever released an update of your software product then you likely faced the problem of notifying your existing customers about the update. In this post I’d like to give a simple yet very important advice how to notify your customers properly.

Releasing the upgrade is a very important task. After several months of development and testing you may get tired and miss some important details on the final stage - distribution and official announcement.

Here is a list of the most common issues that may happen during the release and reduce the effectiveness of your announcement:

• There is a bug in your software
• There is a bug in your setup utility
• The download link is broken
• Your server is unexpectedly down
• There are typos and mistakes in your announcement text
• … or else

You must detect the possible unexpected problems and fix them before all your customers have received the announcement message. The trick is easy - send your announcement by portions.

The first pilot portion of your mailing must be sent just to a few customers, about of 100-150 contacts. Those users must be as different as possible: from different countries, with different operating systems, corporate and home users, old clients and newbies, etc… Usually the first mailing to such small yet contrasting group of users allows detecting the possible issues in your release or notification. In the same time you won’t be overwhelmed with support request from thousands of disappointed people.

Wait for about a day for possible problem reports and initial feedback. If everything is OK then you may send another portion of mailings to about 5-10% of your customers. Wait for another day. If everything is OK this time then continue sending your announcement by portions of 15-20% with pauses of several hours between each session.

This simple approach will allow you to:

• quickly detect the possible problems in your release;
• keep the majority of your customers happy and properly informed;
• save your support team from the sudden hurricane of the bug reports;
• keep your mail server work load stable.

This post is written by our special guest, Nikolay Tyushkov.
Nikolay is an owner of Softvoile. The most known software titles by Softvoile are Flashpaste - an utility for managing and quick pasting text templates, and Clipdiary - a free utility for keeping the clipboard history.

As a veteran of ISV business, Nikolay has great practical experience he would like to share with colleagues. Today he unveils 7 steps to speed up software technical support tasks.

If you develop and sell your products then you are sure to have a lot of users, and … a huge number of questions to your technical support.

It’s an infinite chain of similar questions and standard answers - “Why didn’t I get my registration key?”, “How do I move my data to another computer?”, “What button should I press to get this thing I see in the picture?”, and many others repetitive inquiries.

Regardless you have FAQ section in your help file or on your website you have to answer the same questions every day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get rid of boring mechanical work, but you can considerably speed it up. Similar questions mean standard answers. Let’s see what can be done about it.

1. Start creating a database of your standard answers. It is the first thing you should do. For example, if you are telling a user how to register a program then enter the answer into the database at once. When you are writing an instruction on some feature in the program, add it to the database as well. Believe me you will have to answer the same things more than once.
2. Write in the most general way. Write not as if you were answering a specific question from this particular user, but as if this answer satisfied everyone who would ask similar questions.
3. Make the description as detailed as possible. If you want to tell a user how to select a checkbox in options, also write how to open the dialog with these options, how to find the necessary checkbox and what it will result in. It will reduce the number of clarification requests and will save you lots of time.
4. If you have several products, try to avoid product names in common phrases. For instance, in a message about resending the registration key, write the answer template so that it can be used for any of your programs. Or you can better use a program that allows you to insert text macros.
5. Organize your answer templates. Put the general phrases in one category, registration questions in another category, problem solutions in still another one …
6. Store your answer templates in a special program developed for this purpose that can paste the template text into the any application practically easily.
7. Use Hot Keys to quickly insert the template text in the answer. Using hot keys rather then clicking through many menus will bring your productivity to a new level. You will be able to easily reply to message with one hand. What can be easier?

All these important points can be easily achieved with a special tool for pasting text snippets, Flashpaste (www.flashpaste.com ).
Flashpaste offers the complete set of features you need to reply your support messages quickly: text categories, hot keys support, plain and formatted text with full Unicode support, macros for inserting timestamps, substitution macros, database sharing among several employees and a lot of other useful functions. Also, Flashpaste will be useful for everyone who works with texts a lot: software developers, web designers, technical writers and translators.

Thanks for sharing this list, Nikolay!

There are problems in your software!

Otherwise your “demo installations / orders” ratio must be 100%, is it? If it’s 100% don’t read this post and write your own one about how you achieved this.

People are lazy and they will hardly write you by e-mail about problems they have with your program. They likely will remove your software from computer and will start evaluate a competitor’s product. The only chance to receive feedback from such users is to grab their attention during uninstall process.

There are many posts and discussions about how to properly implement the uninstall feedback. I’d like to write about our own experience. This is how the uninstall feedback is made in Dr.Explain - a rapid help authoring software.

Our setup program is made with Inno Setup.

We simply added the following code in the [code] section of .iss file:

[Code]
…
procedure DeinitializeUninstall();
var
ErrorCode: Integer;
begin
if MsgBox(’Why are you removing ProductName software? ‘ #13#13 ‘Would you like to answer, please?’, mbConfirmation, MB_YESNO) = idYes then
ShellExec(’open’, ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/unistallform.php’, ”, ”, SW_SHOWNORMAL, ewNoWait, ErrorCode);
end;

As you see, this hook opens a web form on the product website in browser. Many users don’t like when applications run browsers without their confirmation. So, we have to ask first if a user wants to open the uninstall feedback form.

This simple trick helped us gather valuable feedback from people and even to close several sales with those initially “unhappy” users.

Below there is a couple of related links about other ways of implementing uninstall feedback in Inno Setup:
More proactive way to force the user to write the feedback
Uninstall Survey plug-in for Inno Setup

One of the strongest psychological signal for everyone is his or her name. Calling someone by name is a good way to attract his/her attention and to make the conversation more confidential and trustworthy.
So, when you answer support e-mails start and finish your message with a name of the person. This will increase the positive effect of your message. If the message is relatively long then you may address your customer by name in the middle of the text also.

What a simple trick!

This is truth!

First of all they tell you about weak sides of your software and business. So, you know what must be improved and polished. Second, angry users can become the most loyal ones.

Surprised?

In psychology, this is called “Pendulum effect” - it’s much easier to move the pendulum to the right if it’s on the left rather than in the bottom. Often it’s easier to turn the negative emotions into positive than to turn no emotions into positive.

Sometimes, an initially angry user whom you help polite and quickly to resolve his problem will become more loyal to your software or service than an average user. The emotional people often express their emotions on public forums or blogs. Turn their negative emotions into positive one and such users will be good word-of-mouth conductors.

For many years in software development and product support business I tried this technique many times and this really works.

Have you ever thought about establishing a certification program for users of your software?
If your software is quite sophisticated and requires training then you can build a community of professionals around your product through the system of personal certificates. Offer your users to pass a series of on-line tests and award them with personal certificates like e.g. Microsoft does. “Certified Professional” sounds cool, doesn’t it?

You should follow the key principles to make your certification program really valuable for users:

• Make exams hard to pass without good knowledge of your software. People must feel that they are true professionals. This will make them really proud to have your certificate.
• Send paper certificates with your seal and signature on them. So people could hang them on the wall in their offices. At least give a file which they can print out themselves.
• It must be easy for everyone to validate someone’s certificate on your web site. This will prevent fraud certificates.
• Offer real benefits for the certified users: high priority support, free subscriptions for training stuff, access to private sections on product forum, participation in beta testing, invitation to off-line meetings and road shows, discounts, gifts, etc…

What will the certification give to users:

• People like to be “certified professionals”. It’s like a membership in a private elite club.
• The certificate will add points to their CV and maybe some dollars to their salary.
• They will receive extra benefits (see above).

What will the certification give to you:

• People will learn and test your product more thoroughly while preparing for tests. You will receive more valuable feedback from users.
• When the certificate is hanging on the wall or is mentioned in someone’s CV it will work like advertisement of your software brand.
• The certification program will make your product and company looking more serious and professional itself. This is a good way to differentiate from competitors and to make your software an industry standard.
• You will create the professional community that will be spreading the words of mouth about your product. The certified professionals will help you with developing ideas and will evangelize your software among other industry professionals. They will lead many new customers to you and they will educate them themselves. If the certification program is done right then it will be a kind of religion.

Of course, not any software is suitable for establishing the certification program.

• The software must be complex. There must be a real difference between professionals and average users.
• The software must be expensive enough. Maintaining the certification program requires time and money from you.
• The software must be business oriented. People must be proud to show the certificate to their colleagues, customers, or employers.

If you’re looking for new ways to promote your product then consider this idea about certification. If you already have a certification program for your users then I’d be glad to hear (read) about your experience with it.

When a user emails to you a feature request or an issue report you may not realize if he uses the latest version of your product or not. Maybe he simply must download an update to resolve the problem or you really must fix the bug in the newest build?
Today, I’d like to tell how to simplify your support work with a simple trick. I’ll just describe our own experience.

In our product, Dr.Explain, we have ‘Send E-mail to support‘ menu item under Help group. If user clicks on it, the default e-mail program will create a draft of support request message. Our trick is automatically adding application version number to the subject of the message. Below there is a primitive code snippet for this function. You may easily adopt it for your programming language.

CString sFile;
::GetModuleFileName(NULL, sFile.GetBuffer(MAX_PATH + 1), MAX_PATH);
sFile.ReleaseBuffer();
short n1, n2, n3, n4;
GetFileVer(sFile, &n1, &n2, &n3, &n4);
CString vers;
vers.Format(_T(”mailto:support@drexplain.com?Subject=Support%%20request%%20for%%20Dr.Explain%%20%i.%i.%i”), n1, n2, n3);
::ShellExecute(NULL, _T(”open”), vers, NULL,NULL, SW_SHOW);

This function will create a message draft like this one:

Now we always know which version is installed on the user’s PC. You may create message drafts that contain more details about your product installation and the user’s OS environment. This will help you handle support requests fast and precisely.